Let us know how we can help

Sales & Pricing

Speak to a rep about your business needs

Contact Sales

Help & Support

See our product support options

Contact Support

General inquiries and locations

Contact us

Popular destinations

Full-stack observability: What you need to know

Develop a holistic, real-time view of your complete IT stack. Gain the visibility you need to dramatically improve IT security, operations, and incident management.

Full-Stack Observability

Connect with us

Full-stack observability gives you a complete picture of how your IT estate is operating—at a moment’s notice. Learn how full-stack observability accelerates incident response, prevents security and operations problems from happening, and improves user experiences.

Full-stack observability: An Overview

Full-stack observability gives you a complete picture of how your IT estate is operating—at a moment’s notice. Learn how full-stack observability accelerates incident response, prevents security and operations problems from happening, and improves user experiences.

What is full stack observability: Full stack observability defined

Full-stack observability is the ability to determine the state of any asset within your entire IT environment at any given moment. It provides both a holistic view of your full IT stack, as well as a granular view—down to the code level—of your applications and the endpoints they operate within. A mature, full-stack observability practice supports incident detection, investigation, and response, while also giving you the information you need to proactively improve the security and operations of your IT stack.

On this page, we will provide an overview of what full-stack monitoring is, how it works, the benefits and outcomes it generates, and how to best bring it to life by combining it with out-of-the-box artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) solutions.

Observability vs. monitoring

The terms “observability” and “monitoring” are sometimes used interchangeably, yet they refer to different practices. Thankfully, observability vs. monitoring is an easy topic to clarify.

Monitoring is one element of observability, and provides some of the full-stack telemetry data that observability requires. Yet observability can provide a full-stack solution that goes further than monitoring isolated systems, incorporates additional data and capabilities, and provides a holistic view of the IT environment.

Further, there are four key differences between observability and monitoring.

  1. Monitoring is an action you perform (e.g., setting a CPU % usage threshold and receiving an alert when it’s breached) while observability is a property a system has or does not (e.g., you can know the state of an asset or you can’t).
  2. Monitoring is reactive (e.g., when you receive an alert, you know there’s a problem and you rush to put out the fire) while observability is proactive (e.g., it can be used during response but it also lets you proactively search for hidden issues).
  3. Monitoring tells you about symptoms of a deeper underlying issue within a system (e.g., when an alert is sent) while observability can tell you the root cause problems that led the symptom to manifest and the alert to be triggered.
  4. Monitoring is used within simple, stable systems where behavior is predictable and problems are known and have firm parameters, while observability can find “unknown unknown” problems within dynamic, unpredictable environments.

Operational resilience in banking and financial services

Operational resilience is important for organizations in every industry. Everyone needs to be able to maintain their core digital business functions and data at all times.

However, operational resilience is particularly important in banking and financial services, — which includes traditional banks, bitcoin exchanges, bettering exchanges, and any institutionone else that handles money in a digital state. These organizations must be able to keep up-to-date account balances, move money, and clear accounts within a specific time period (generally by close of business each day).

Operational resilience in financial services is important. If a banking or financial company fails to maintain its services, it will lose business, customers, and customer trust, and face steep fines associated with new and increasing regulatory requirements.

Full-stack observability benefits

With observability, you can drive many new capabilities, and enhance many of the core functions of IT, security, and business leadership teams. This generates substantial, real-world benefits that include:

Full-stack observability and AIOps

Full-stack observability is not a silver bullet on its own. It can be challenging to implement because it integrates many different data sources and needs to normalize and combine data sets from them while resolving any security or regulatory issues along the way.

It’s a large, cross-functional project, and once implementation is over, your solution still needs to be managed.

AIOps can help, leveraging AI to overcome a wide range of operational challenges quickly, efficiently, and accurately. AIOps solutions can lighten the lift required to implement a full-stack observability practice across large-scale IT estates and then assist in managing -the solutions’ routine processes.

In addition, AIOps can make good use of the full-stack observability provided by your solution. It can perform many core identification, investigation, and remediation tasks at speed and scale. With it, you can accelerate, expand, and improve the accuracy of both incident management and vulnerability management across your entire IT infrastructure.

In sum: AIOps does double duty. It can help you implement your full-stack observability practice, and then leverage that observability for many security and operational tasks.

Analyst report

The Forrester Wave™: AIOps Platforms, Q2 2025

Read the report

Picking an AIOps solution for full-stack observability

We’ve made it simple for enterprises that wish to implement both full-stack observability and AIOps with a unified, out-of-the-box solution.

BMC Helix for observability and AIOps is a full-stack solution and a recognized leader in its category. It provides core capabilities that include:

Resources